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for my mother, on her 91st birthday, 12/19, who tells me she wishes she were 30 so that she could once again teach kids about this world today and take to the streets

“I don’t know. I don’t think I can go to study abroad in Paris,” she says and hesitates and grins.

When she sits across from me, her shoulders are barely higher than my desktop. Her hijab frames her face perfectly: wide, inquisitive, dark eyes that are alive, dancing, penetrating; high cheekbones; her lips are full and when she smiles she gets small creases at the sides of her mouth that resemble ripples edging from the shore of a serene lake.

I ask why not?, though I know the answer: She’s from Sierra Leone and a Muslim.

“Even when I flew to Kenya,” she continues, still smiling, “the police at the airport stopped me — it was very scary — because they thought I was Somali. No one is safe — no one that looks like me. An African Muslim.”

She giggles a bit, this time as if to call attention to the tragic irony of it all.

This young woman, but nineteen, left her family and traveled from Sierra Leone to Hong Kong to the United States to the state of Vermont andMiddlebury College for an education. She’s earned scholarships all the way. She’s brilliant and will undoubtedly do great things in the future.

But reality is harsh; the world she — and all of us, really — navigate is dark, foreboding, threatening, many parts forbidden.

How then do we justify this world to our students? What do we tell her? Where’s opportunity now?

What is the educator’s role in addressing the harsh reality that not everyone has the right and capacity to move about freely in what we still falsely call the free world?

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Education — with a capital E — has effectively divided the nation. Education has been eating away at the fiber of this country for quite some time. This is quite obvious when examining the 2016 Presidential Election. Yet, Education is not being held accountable for the mess we’re in; it’s getting a pass.

We can get a sense of this by looking, first, at popular media. Second, we can see how obstructionist our Education system really is, and the consequences.

Bill Maher calls Trump supporters idiots. “What we learned,” Maher tells CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, “is that there’s a lot of vulgar, tacky, racist people in this country, more than I thought…A basket of deplorables.”

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Granada, Spain — The modern state comes into being during the Middle Ages in Europe. It establishes what many economists call a social good, a strong military that (a) provides security for citizens, (b) gives room for nationalism, and (c) implements accountability. We have the right to live securely and without fear, the right to define a national identity, and to create the means by which to expand fortunes, guided by laws. The Modernaccountable State, there it is. And it’s all held together by taxation — people pay for protection, pay for nationalism, and pay for laws.

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Granda, Spain — The prodigal child has come home to roost. I am in the Albayzín section of Granada. This once autonomous,Andalusian Muslim community, which has retained the narrow streets of its Medieval Moorish past, I’d argue, is ground zero for tomorrow’s world.

It’s all here- the sights, sounds, smells; Syrians, Moroccan, Lebanese, Lybians; the restaurants, Halal food, leather stores up steep walkways; the incense; wild colorful ingredients, spices and herbs. Arabic pushing up against Spanish and other European languages. The mosque and the church, Jewish history. Young women offer henna, which comes from the Arabic, ḥinnāʾ, for 1 Euro; men smoking their cigarettes stand in front of their shops. There are tea and hookah lounges. There’s flamenco, too, where it originates (as well as in Extremadura and Murcia) — a doleful synthesis of Romani, Arabic, and Spanish cultures that eventually find their way to the New World and metamorphose into el tango.

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Take a look: we are all getting our new credit cards with computer chips, something that has been long in coming.

Have you tried using your card, though?

I routinely walk to a counter, see the chip-enabled card reader, and when I go to use it, I’m met with this halting remark by the cashier (that we have cashiers, still, is another matter): “Wait. No. It doesn’t work. Please slide your card instead.”

“So,” then a pause. We must begin there: “So” is as if to say, summarizing 5 Writers Imagine, Now that you’ve said what you said, following Thoreau’s most men lead lives of quiet desperation and that this desperation is orchestrated—meaning it is systemic, purposefully constructed, a mirror of our socio-economic structure—and that this manufacturing of longing brings with it great suffering, a cost to society, its citizens, everyone, why then live as we do? What has gotten us here? How did we get here?

I’m highly privileged, as you see. This is why I mention it: I’m looking at this too. With this kind of privilege, there’s much responsibility. To start, then, I’ll say that we’ll look at the 5 authors chronologically, following publication dates. At the very least, this places each author in an intellectual history. Contextualization like this will afford us the long view.

Long-range factors are already evident in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s America struggling for meaning in the face of brutal slavery — an initial extreme we can’t escape; the struggle continues today. As does our desire fortranscendence, to move beyond who we are and into dreams. I wonder what we hear now if we put Emerson’s American against the multi-racial, multi-ethnic, diverse, boisterous, cosmopolitan America of Adichie, the last of our authors in the seminar?